International

Our rights and wrongs

A guide for readers

What Harold Macmillan famously called “events, dear boy, events” can so easily upset the best-laid plans—and predictions. Events happen, and they change the outlook. So, amazingly, not everything you read in The World in 2007 will turn out precisely as predicted, even though our forecasts have been the result of the finest judgment based on the best information available at the time of writing.

Readers wondering how much store to set by this year's crop of forecasts might find it useful to know how well—or badly—we did last time. Analysis of the predictions in The World in 2006 suggests ten simple rules for approaching the current edition.

1. Big projects won't necessarily be completed when we say. We naively thought that Airbus's superjumbo would be flying passengers by late 2006. Wembley stadium is over a year late. The launch of Microsoft's Vista software was put back to 2007.

2. We will call about three elections out of four right. Our hits included Chile, Costa Rica and Italy; Canada was a big miss.

3. Trust us as a guide to what Donald Rumsfeld might call the “known knowns”: scheduled events such as summits, big anniversaries, eye-catching cultural shows and major sports tournaments.

4. But our sports predictions will be wrong. We expected Brazil to dazzle at football's World Cup in Germany.

5. You can have more confidence in our judgment on global business. We flagged BAE Systems' sale of its stake in Airbus, for example, as well as the planned merger of Chicago's two big exchanges and mainstream media's embrace of blogging.

6. Predictions on geopolitics should be pretty sound too. A year ago, we were right to expect no draw-down of American troops in Iraq, delays in financial help for Africa, a French-American rapprochement and an American love-fest with India.

7. We will be a little too optimistic about human advancement. We said Americans would stop getting fatter. Really? We mused that someone would invent a formula to measure knowledge; they didn't (but someone did propose a formula for happiness).

8. We will be a little too pessimistic about economic prospects. We correctly—at last—predicted that the housing boom in America would end, but wrongly expected slower global growth (it has been the strongest for 30 years) including a slowdown in China (which has stormed ahead even faster than before).

9. Whatever we say, Fidel Castro will survive. In last year's edition we invited a historian, Niall Ferguson, to review our record over 20 years of publishing this yearbook. He pointed out that we had consistently and vainly been predicting Mr Castro's demise for years—but that did not stop us speculating in The World in 2006 on what would happen in Cuba if he were to die. In the event the old revolutionary defied us again, undergoing a serious operation but stubbornly turning 80 instead of dying.

10. Some predictions will be neither right nor wrong but simply absent. We failed to foretell Google's purchase of YouTube, Ariel Sharon's stroke, the furore over Danish cartoons, the war in Lebanon or the coup in Thailand.

So what will we have missed in 2007? We know the answer already: events, dear reader, events.